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Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

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Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#371

Post by leptons »

eschaton wrote: post #211
bicx wrote: post #79

2025 feels like a cardinal year for top-down decisions we all just have to endure for the present. The best we can do is bitch loudly and often, and hope the people at the top still feel threatened by consumers/constituents. This Liquid Glass decision is particularly challenging for my tiny startup. We have multiple platforms including iOS and Android. I was hoping to share much of our design language across iOS and…

You were wrong to even attempt to share design language across platforms. You should make your applications good native citizens if you have any respect for your users, because yours isn’t the only software they use.

As a developer, I don't care what Apple or Google's "design language" whims are today. If someone can't figure out how to use a well designed app, no matter the "design language", a fancy skin isn't going to fix that.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#372

Post by f30e3dfed1c9 »

npunt wrote: post #168

TLDR not all perspectives have optimal legibility, but if it's easy to change perspective to achieve optimal legibility, then it might be a good tradeoff if you get other value in return. And phones have gotten bigger, and this is a reset of default device expectation. -- As an app developer I (generally) like liquid glass, it injects some much needed fun and freshness into our devices. It's still rough around the ed…

I know I'm old and grumpy but it's hard to think of anything I want less from my computer and my stupid phone than "fun and freshness."

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#374

Post by SilverElfin »

Personally I like Liquid Glass. HOWEVER, I do think there are serious problems with stability and bugs across all Apple products. From iCloud not synchronizing correctly, to Apple apps not authenticating properly on Windows, to weird glitches on iOS where the keyboards don’t show up sometimes, to the autofill not working well, to text selection being awkward. The quality of what they’re trying to do is just down across the board. And once you’re there, it doesn’t make sense to pay luxury prices for a restrictive walled garden.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#375

Post by tavavex »

CjHuber wrote: post #341
Naru41 wrote: post #324

This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now -- (Windows engineering team 2012) https://web.archive.org/web/20120614042824/http://blogs.msdn... -- "Cheesy and dated" -- it keeps hitting me through the years.

Oh wow, a statement like this coming from a blog entry about creating windows 8?? Maybe it has to do with that I‘m Gen Z but I absolutely love Frutiger Aero. It never looked cheesy, first it was modern then it was nostalgic. All meanwhile I still have trauma from the hideous Metro tiles.

I'm also gen Z. For me the reaction to Windows Aero was similar, but I guess that's just how it is because it's what we grew up with. The blog post is talking about imitating materials in general though, and I can totally see how it can be taken too far. Think putting wood PNGs as backgrounds for app elements or adding brushed aluminium textures on sliders, things like those look pretty dated to me now. I'm guessing the Microsoft designers just had a far lower tolerance for that stuff, since IMO Windows 7 was very tame in terms of this - it felt just abstractly transparent and shiny more than skeuomorphic.

Metro was also just pretty bad on its own, irrespective of what came before or after. It was way too simplified, and despite that everything was HUGE so you could really see every bit of detail that was taken away. As usual, Microsoft was chasing the big new thing that never came by designing half the OS around tablet PCs. Windows 10 toned it down like how 7 toned down on Vista, and after that it was pretty alright for me. A much better example of a UI that came out then and aged well was Android 5 with Material Design.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#376

Post by dpark »

sroussey wrote: post #361
walkabout wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only time before this I've felt like Apple took a huge UX or appearance dive on an OS upgrade was iOS6 -> iOS7. People complain about almost every macOS upgrade, but the closest they've come to bothering me is that I hated the new tab styles in desktop Safari they introduced a while ago, but that was configurable so I just set it back to normal and that was that. I've disliked other things (the Touch Bar was neve…

The touchbar was great, but it should have been above the (half height) function keys. Had they done that, it would still be around.

“No one wants an actual touch screen, but they definitely want a really narrow touchscreen directly above their keyboard. It’s contextual.”

I had a MacBook Pro with the touchbar for a little while. I found it to be useless. I do agree if they had left the function keys alone it would have been a much better, or at least less annoying, option.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#377

Post by sph »

CjHuber wrote: post #341
Naru41 wrote: post #324

This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now -- (Windows engineering team 2012) https://web.archive.org/web/20120614042824/http://blogs.msdn... -- "Cheesy and dated" -- it keeps hitting me through the years.

Oh wow, a statement like this coming from a blog entry about creating windows 8?? Maybe it has to do with that I‘m Gen Z but I absolutely love Frutiger Aero. It never looked cheesy, first it was modern then it was nostalgic. All meanwhile I still have trauma from the hideous Metro tiles.

Must be a Gen Z meme because it was traumatic for those that lived it. It reminds me of Windows Vista and, my god, the first few years of KDE 4 - it has taken me until last year to try KDE again (and finally it has shed it’s silly hard contrast black transparency phase)

Gen Z like it because of nostalgia, not because of quality or because it actually looks any good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plasma_Workspaces.png - ugh.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#378

Post by fnordpiglet »

Naru41 wrote: post #324

This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now -- (Windows engineering team 2012) https://web.archive.org/web/20120614042824/http://blogs.msdn... -- "Cheesy and dated" -- it keeps hitting me through the years.

Yes making everything skeuomorphic is the ultimate finger in Ivy’s eye for no apparent reason other than it was very different and got some designers promoted. They had to answer the “iOS isn’t changing a lot” with something so they went with the dumbest regression ever.

Now when I try to hit send in messages I often have to hit it twice because it has to show the dumb flash which requires a longer delay than I’m used to in order to register the send. There is no aspect the redeems it and many that damn it.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#379

Post by nine_k »

bavent wrote: post #296
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the issues is almost certainly that the app developers didn't add the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility = YES [0] item to the Info.plist. Set that, and it doesn't use Liquid Glass in your app. I set it for all my apps. One was designed by a professional designer, who absolutely defecated masonry, when I showed him what it did to our app. I'm worried that Apple may end up ignoring that flag, and will force us to us…

I’m referring entirely to built-in Apple apps - Mail, Messages, etc. The in-house apps can’t even get it right, which to me means: - devs are so siloed, nobody knows what’s going on - product is not communicating anything outside of individual fiefdoms - there is zero QA testing - no designers are actually signing off on the final results …which all seem pretty typical for a large bureaucracy, I guess I just had high…

Such reclusiveness is not an obligatory property of large corporations. Say, Google around 2011-2015 may have had fiefdoms, but at least things were quite transparent, you could know what other departments are doing, and see all the code. Facebook circa 2020 was surprisingly transparent and peer-to-peer, at least in the area I touched, messaging and storage infra. I've seen companies 1000x smaller that had incomparably more reclusiveness and opaqueness.

What I hear about Apple sounds more and more like what I used to hear about Microsoft, especially Microsoft of Ballmer times, when teams inside it clandestinely warred with each other, instead of cooperating.

Apple has this vision-driven culture, and the inclination towards internal secrecy, so that competitors won't steal their thunder. It worked relatively well under Steve Jobs, and whoever he assigned. It worked far less successfully when Jony Ive's ideas of usability made Macbooks into visually more sleek, but less loved devices. Whoever came up with Liquid Glass, has some interesting vision, but the gimmick value in its current implementation seems to dominate, and the usability shortcomings seem to be ignored. Technology-wise, it's half-baked. This means to me that Apple internally not in a good state, the leadership has trouble hearing the voice of reason.

Apple of course has an immense inertia. But giants like Nokia or General Motors also used to have an immense inertia, wads of cash, and dominant market positions.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#380

Post by keyshapegeo99 »

andix wrote: post #370
keyshapegeo99 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new windowing system is actually rather decent when used with a keyboard + all window tiling / maximising / app switching keyboard shortcuts memorised. Although the lack of Slide Over is still inexplicable and sucks. The issue is that most people don't use iPads with keyboards. The windowing system in this case is then an absolute nightmare compared to what came before, as touch-based users were clearly a distant…

It looks so easy on the video. If I try to drag a full screen window it only works in 20% of the cases. In the other cases either one of those things happen: menu bar opens, widgets opens, control center opens, lock screen opens, or I tap some controls in the app. I don't think it's "an issue" that I use an iPad without mouse and keyboard most of the time. Last time I checked the iPad was designed as a touch device.

I completely agree and I just put in the bit about the keyboard shortcuts to pre-empt comments from the minority of iPad users who never remove the iPad from their Magic Keyboard saying they quite like the update.

Although regarding your final sentence - I don't think Apple even knows what the iPad is supposed to be any more. It seems execs completely lack any kind of product vision. And given both the tackiness of Liquid Glass and the various insulting ad campaigns that have trickled out over the past few years - they also clearly lack taste. In other words, Apple is Just Another Tech Company now.

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